Recommended Tritium Oxide Deposition Velocity for Use in Savannah River Site Safety Analyses

The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) has recently questioned the appropriate value for tritium deposition velocity used in the MELCOR Accident Consequence Code System Ver. 2 (Chanin and Young 1998) code when estimating bounding dose (95th percentile) for safety analysis (DNFSB 2011). The purpose of this paper is to provide appropriate, defensible values of the tritium deposition velocity for use in Savannah River Site (SRS) safety analyses. To accomplish this, consideration must be given to the re-emission of tritium after deposition. Approximately 85% of the surface area of the SRS is forested. The majority of the forests are pine plantations, 68%. The remaining forest area is 6% mixed pine and hardwood and 26% swamp hardwood. Most of the path from potential release points to the site boundary is through forested land. A search of published studies indicate daylight, tritiated water (HTO) vapor deposition velocities in forest vegetation can range from 0.07 to 2.8 cm/s. Analysis of the results of studies done on an SRS pine plantation and climatological data from the SRS meteorological network indicate that the average deposition velocity during daylight periods is around 0.42 cm/s. The minimum deposition velocity was determined to be about 0.1 cm/s, which is the recommended bounding value. Deposition velocity and residence time (half-life) of HTO in vegetation are related by the leaf area and leaf water volume in the forest. For the characteristics of the pine plantation at SRS the residence time corresponding to the average, daylight deposition velocity is 0.4 hours. The residence time corresponding to the night-time deposition velocity of 0.1 cm/s is around 2 hours. A simple dispersion model which accounts for deposition and re-emission of HTO vapor was used to evaluate the impact on exposure to the maximally exposed offsite individual (MOI) at the SRS boundary (Viner 2012). Under conditions that produce the bounding, 95th percentile MOI exposure, i.e., low wind speed, weak turbulence, night, low deposition velocity, the effect of deposition and re-emission on MOI exposure was found to be very small. The exposure over the two hour period following arrival of the plume was found to be decreased by less than 0.05 %. Furthermore the sensitivity to deposition velocity was low. Increasing deposition velocity to 0.5 cm/s reduced exposure to 0.3 %. After a 24 hour period, an MOI would have been exposed to all of the released material. Based on the low sensitivity of MOI exposure to the value of deposition velocity when re-emission is considered, it is appropriately conservative to use a 0.0 cm/s effective deposition velocity for safety analysis in the MACCS2 code.